Customer Reviews

North by Northeast: Wabanaki, Akwesasne Mohawk, and Tuscarora Traditional Arts

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What a jewel this book is! Kathleen Mundell, a folklorist with more than 20 years' experience working with the tribes of the Northeast, has produced a sensitively written and beautifully illustrated an in-depth study of the tribes' craft traditions, covering basketry and bead work in depth while also touching on war clubs and canoes, and more. Mundell interweaves the practitioner's own words, written and spoken, with her own text, describing the traditions, materials and challenges involved in the making of the objects and the continuation of the tradition. Beautifully illustrated with many exquisite color photographs, this is a coffee-table book, important cultural history, and call-to-action all in one package, at an affordable price. Not to be missed.

NORTH BY NORTHEAST is more than just the catalog of an exhibition of modern Native American baskets and related arts. (The exhibit will travel on a limited tour through the Northeast, beginning in 2008.) If you were fortunate enough to see the show, you probably have already purchased a copy, as the book is stunning. Author and editor, folklorist Kathleen Mundell has here produced an incisive and deeply appreciative look at three northeast Native American basketmaking communities -- one in rural Maine, the other two in far-upstate New York.
The book provides a welcome and in-depth introduction to traditional basketmaking practiced in these communities. Readers will quickly realize that this is not a how-to-do-it book --the basketwork shown is extremely complicated and was learned one-on-one, with elders passing basketmaking traditions and techniques to younger tribal members, usually within a family, and often over a shared lifetime.

The book's extraordinary illustrations deserve special mention. Several contributing photographers, working seemingly with a single vision, provide an immediate, even tactile, close-up look at the baskets in the show, and make apparent the inspiration native basketmakers find in Nature. The "globe thistle pattern" baskets, for example, seem as complicated --and as beautiful-- as the thistles that inspire them. The Work Basket category includes many types which survive today, even if no longer used as originally intended. Corn-Washing Baskets, Potato Baskets, Fish Scale Baskets and many others traditional forms, as well as many modern inovations continue to be produced, apparently because of the pleasure derived in the making, as well, of course, for income derived from their sale. Other basket forms such as Strawberry baskets, Corn baskets, and vases woven over glass jars were developed for the tourist and market trade, and continue to be made as well, in a tradition which is itself now more than a century old.

Ms Mundell is a careful observer and seems to have asked just the right questions to bring out the native artists' feelings for their craft, as well as their unique points of view regarding the basketmaking tradition within their communities, their personal histories and development as artisans, and includes extensive statements by many of the basketmakers themselves.

Since basket materials such as sweetgrass and ash splints are such a basic part of the object, N By NW also includes discussion of basket makers' concerns over vanishing and endangered supplies and the artists' conservation efforts. Besides the basketmaking tradition, North By Northeast looks at related crafts such as beadwork and birch bark construction.

Working within tradition, but moving towards the future, as one of the basket makers says, keeps the artists in touch with the PAST through basketmaking tradition and techniques, the PRESANT in the practice of the craft, gathering and preparing the materials, and selling in a changing market, and in the FUTURE in teaching the tradition to students of basketmaking and through efforts to protect of the basic materials of basketmaking. We give the book our highest recommendation.

Michael Houghton
BEN FRANKLIN BOOKSHOP,
Nyack, New York.

There is a concerted and laudable movement to preserve and showcase Native American traditional culture as expressed through beadwork, basketry, canoe making, wood carving, and quilting. "North By Northeast: Wabanaki, Akwesasne Mohawk, and Tuscarora Traditional Arts" by folklorist and ethnographer Kathleen Mundell showcases the works and commentaries of thirty-five traditional Native American artists living and working primarily in Maine and New York. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the text is as informed and informative as it is insightful and inspiring. Written as an accompaniment to an exhibition that will travel to the Akwesasne Museum and Cultural Center in Hogansburg, NY (May-September 2008), the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine (October-May 2009), and the Pequot Museum and Research Center in Mashantucket, Connecticut (May-September 2009), "North By Northeast" is enthusiastically recommended for personal, academic, and community library Native American Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.

We bought this book to accompany two authentic, 1930s Penobscot Indian baskets from Ducktrap Basket Shop and Museum in Lincolnville, Maine. This book could not be more perfectly well-suited for explaining this unique wedding gift.